Bad Moon Rising

Chapter 44

(1)

“Put the guns down and put your hands above your heads.”

Crow and LaMastra both had their shotguns aimed at Tow-Truck Eddie. Everyone else in that part of the wing was either dead or dying.

“Put them down!”

“Not going to happen, Eddie,” Crow said.

“Stand down, Officer,” growled LaMastra. “We’re all on the same team here.”

Oswald’s blue eyes cut back and forth between them. His face was florid, his eyes bright. One sleeve of his shirt was torn and there were long scratches carved into the sculpted muscles of his arms. “Crow…I don’t know who’s who or what’s what right now. I just know that everyone in this town has gone crazy. People I know—people I go to church with—have been killing each other!” He took a step forward—half threatening, half pleading. “I saw the organist from my church, Cubby Sanders, a man I’ve known since I was five years old, I saw him bite the throat out of the reporter from Fox News. He killed him and…” He made a sick sound and swallowed several times. “He killed him and drank his blood.” A tear broke from his left eye and rolled slowly down toward his chin. “I don’t understand.”

Crow lowered his shotgun, then reached out and pushed LaMastra’s barrel down.

“Look, Eddie…I don’t how to begin explaining this to you, but there are monsters in Pine Deep. Vampires.”

Eddie lowered his gun, too. “Vampires. God save our souls…”

“Who else is with you?” asked LaMastra. “Where’s Chief Bernhardt? How many men can we count on?”

The big man shook his head. “They’re all dead. Except…except those that are with them. I saw Shirley O’Keefe trying to kill a child, a little boy. I…shot her. In the chest.”

“She didn’t die, did she?” Crow asked, stepping closer.

“No. I had to shoot her again and again. The evil in her was so strong that she didn’t want to die.”

“How many of them are there?” asked LaMastra, looking up and down the hall. “Do you know that, Officer? How many of these things are we facing?”

Eddie straightened. “The gates of Hell have opened and the host of Satan walks the earth.”

“Oh brother,” LaMastra said softly.

“How many, Eddie,” Crow insisted.

“Thousands,” Eddie said dully. “There are thousands of them.” Then his eyes brightened. “But I know who is behind this. If we can find him…and kill him, then Hell will recall its armies.”

Crow looked at LaMastra, who shrugged. “Yeah, we know, too, and if you want to kill that evil son of a bitch, then we’re all on the same team here.”

“Amen to that,” LaMastra agreed.

Down the hall, behind one of the doors, gunfire erupted.

Crow spun around. “Val!”

(2)

BK led the way and Billy Christmas brought up the rear; between them were over a hundred customers and staff. BK had a heavy tree branch in his hands, the jagged end thick with blood. Billy had a piece of rebar he’d uprooted from a fence line. Less than a dozen of their charges carried weapons. Peppered through the group were customers who had eaten some of the candy corn; these were the only ones in the group who didn’t look scared. A few them even sang happy, trippy songs; some were crying and jabbering in invented languages.

“Incoming!” Billy yelled. “On your three.”

BK spun to his right as a group of figures rushed at them from the shadows. He put himself between them and his group, club raised and ready. The lead figure in the other group had a chair leg. Everyone froze.

“BK…?” asked the leader of the other group.

“Jim?”

Jim O’Rear stepped out of the dense shadows beneath a big oak. Behind him Brinke and Debbie fanned out; each of them had clubs. Kramer was at the end of the line, herding the group forward.

“What the hell is going on here?” Brinke asked as Billy trotted up.

“Christ if I know.”

“I think it’s something in the water,” Debbie said. “Drugs or something.”

“Maybe.” BK looked over the newcomers and saw that some of their party were showing the same dazed detachment. He caught Billy’s eye; Billy gave a small shake of his head. Drugs may account for some of it, but some of what they’d seen could not be explained away by drugs. No way.

BK pointed up the hill. “We’re making for the barn. Two doors, plenty of tools. We can hole up there.”

O’Rear nodded. “Outstanding.”

The groups merged together, friends seeking out friends and giving hugs; strangers embracing the way victims of a shared catastrophe will. The night around them seemed to be expanding—there were fewer screams and they were farther away.

Debbie had her head cocked to listen. “I think it’s…stopping.”

“God, I hope so,” BK said. “But let’s get the hell out of the open. Jim, left flank, Kramer on my right. Billy, watch our backs. Come on—let’s go!”

They started running, heading toward the barn, each of them praying that would be the end of it.

(3)

“Shhh,” Foree said, holding a finger to his lips, “let me listen.”

He pressed his ear to the steel door of the projection booth. The terrible screams that had torn the night for the last two hours had quieted. The woman who had first asked him if the monsters could get in still huddled close to him. Her name was Linda—a retired phys ed teacher who had come to hear Foree speak because she had gone to see the original Dawn of the Dead with her husband nearly thirty years ago; now she was trapped in the utter blackness of the booth with the star of the film, and everything was so surreal that she felt like she was in a dream. She touched his arm.

“You…you’re not going to open the door, are you?” Her voice was filled with appalling fear.

He reached for her in the dark, found her shoulder, gave it a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t worry, I’m not opening that door until I know damn sure that the cavalry has arrived. I want to hear bugles blowing.”

She leaned her head against his arm, an act entirely devoid of flirtation. It was based entirely on the need to believe in the solidity of hope. Foree stroked her hair, calming her the way he would soothe a frightened child. The booth was so intensely dark that all that was left to the cowering survivors was patience and prayer.

(4)

“Anything in there?”

“Lotta corpses.”

The vampire who had once been a real estate salesman opened the door to the lecture hall so his companion, who had once been the assistant football coach at Pinelands College, could look inside. The room was awash in blood. It streaked the walls, pooled on the floors, glistened on the faces and bodies of the dead people who lay scattered on the floor or slumped in chairs.

“Someone had fun,” said the real estate man. “Looks like eighty, ninety kills. Shame we missed it.”

The coach smiled. “The cleanup guys should be here soon, then we’ll have eighty or ninety more playing for the home team.”

“Works for me. C’mon, there’s still time to hunt before the ritual. I’m still hungry.”

Grinning like schoolkids, they closed the door and headed out to the campus grounds, where screams and shouts still filled the air.

It was at least five minutes before a voice said, “Everyone stay down.”

One of the slaughtered bodies moved, first raising his head, which moved quite well despite the gaping ruin that was his throat, then getting to his feet. He surveyed the room. There were eighty-seven bodies, but only fifty of them were dead. The others just looked it.

He moved quietly to the door, listened, opened it and looked out, then closed and locked it. “Okay,” he said crisply, “everyone up. We have to move fast.”

Thirty-seven murder victims stood up. All of them looked terrified, but in each of their faces was a spark of hope. The trick had worked. When the attack started the killings had been horrendous. The attackers swarmed in and there had been no warning, no challenge, no hesitation…just slaughter. Panic swept the room and the attackers used that, herding the people back toward the corners, cutting off their lines of escape, killing and moving to the next person packed into the corner.

Then one man—the one who now stood by the door—turned all that around. He grabbed a hot soldering iron from his work table and had leapt at one of the killers, swinging the burning needle over and down onto the back of the monster as he bent over a woman to drink from her throat. The creature screamed once and then went limp. When a second monster saw this and closed on him, the man ripped the soldering iron out of the dead creature’s skull and went straight for the newcomer’s eye socket.

Battles sometimes turn like that. A rout becomes a rally when one person takes a stand and shows how to kill the enemy that everyone else thought was impervious. Instead of a dozen terrorizing several dozen, the survivors became the attackers. One to one the creatures were too strong, but when five or six people tackled them, the physics of overwhelming mass and momentum kicked in. It wasn’t an easy win, and the fifty-nine that had started the counterattack had been stripped down to thirty-seven by the time the last killer went down. Thirty-seven plus the man with the soldering iron.

He tried to lead them outside, but the campus was a war zone. So, he herded his small army back inside and came up with a plan.

Tom Savini had made a career out of making people look dead, look like victims, look like monsters had been at them. He was here in Pine Deep to lecture on that very subject. He had everything to hand. There was enough real blood to reinforce the illusion, and though he had to cajole, browbeat, and, more than once, actually deck one of the survivors to keep them from losing their heads and to encourage cooperation, in the end they all followed his lead.

While Savini was painting wounds on a grad student, the young woman started to cry. “This is real…isn’t it?”

He paused and searched her eyes, then smiled. “I’ve been to ’Nam and I’ve spent my life in the movies. Nothing’s real.”

She gripped his wrist. “Thank you,” she said, her voice low and urgent.

Savini glanced at the door, then back to her. “Thank me when this is over.”

“You got it.”

(5)

Crow pounded his fist on the door. “Val…VAL!”

LaMastra and Tow-Truck Eddie had his back, both of them facing outward to check the hall. The light was bad and half of the emergency bulbs had been smashed. As Crow beat and kicked the door, LaMastra squinted and brought up his shotgun.

“Crow…we got company.”

“Crow! Is that you?” Her voice was muffled, but it was Val.

“Baby, it’s Vince and me. Open the door.”

There was noise and the squeal of something being dragged and then the door flew open. Val was there, completely drenched in blood, her face pale, her eyes dark.

For just a moment—for one terrible slice of time—Crow thought that she had been taken, that she had been consumed by the terror; but then she flew into his arms, and the warmth of her, the heat of her tears, the firm and full-blooded reality of her told him the truth. He pulled her close and kissed her bloody face and lips.

“I told you I’d come back for you, baby.”

“Oh, God, Crow…it’s been so awful.”

“We got company!” LaMastra said again and he broke their moment by firing into the shadows. Something screamed and fell back into the darkness.

Crow and Val brought up their guns and the others in the room tried to crowd into the doorway, which is when the big man standing to Crow’s left turned around and looked into the room and locked eyes with Mike Sweeney.

“No!” Mike cried and staggered back a step.

“The Beast!” hissed Eddie. “Crow, there he is! There’s the monster who has opened the gates of hell!”

Crow looked the wrong way first and saw nothing in the hallway, and then he turned and saw Eddie pointing his gun into the room, right at Mike. He saw the look on Eddie’s face and knew he was going to shoot, so he let go of Val and slammed Eddie’s arm against the doorjamb. The gun fired and the bullet missed Mike’s head by inches.

LaMastra grabbed Eddie by the collar and Crow shoved his chest and they hurled him out into the hallway. Eddie slipped on blood and went down hard, sliding five feet on his ass. LaMastra kicked the gun out of his hand and screwed the hot barrel of his Roadblocker into Eddie’s temple.

“Don’t fucking move,” LaMastra warned.

“Mike, what’s going on? Crow asked. “Val, somebody…what’s this shit?”

Mike pressed past Jonatha and Newton. “Crow…he’s the one that’s been chasing me on the road. He’s the one I told you about.”

“Are you sure?”

“He’s sure,” Val said. “He told us all about it. Eddie even came into the store once.”

“He’s the Beast of the Apocalypse!” Eddie looked pleadingly at LaMastra. “He’s the one responsible for all of this. You have to let me—”

“Crow…?” LaMastra asked.

“Keep him there. Val, Mike, tell me what’s going on. Make it fast.”

They told him a very abbreviated version of what Mike had learned from the Bone Man. They both spoke loud enough for Eddie to hear. While they spoke Crow became aware of Mike’s eyes, and a chill rippled up his spine.

“Holy shit,” he said. He glanced at LaMastra. “Vince?”

“You call the play, man. I’m not emotionally invested in this bozo. Just say the word.”

Crow turned to Eddie and squatted down. “You heard what Val and Mike just said. You got fifteen seconds to give me a reason not to let Vince paint your brains all over the floor.”

“I am the Sword of God.” He said it as if it explained everything.

“And you think this kid is the Antichrist?”

“He is.”

LaMastra nudged him with the shotgun. “One twitch of the finger, Crow, and we’re done with this shit.”

Val came over and knelt down. “Eddie, I want you to listen to me. Mike is not the Antichrist or any other kind of evil. He’s an innocent boy who is as much a victim of all of this as we are. You’ve been lied to by Ubel Griswold, over and over again.”

“No! Satan is the Father of Lies and—”

Val slapped him across the face. “Listen to me, Eddie Oswald; if Mike Sweeney is evil, then you’re a dead man.” She straightened and turned to Mike. “Mike…kill him.”

Mike said, “What?”

“Go on, kill him. If you’re the goddamned Antichrist, then kill this fool, so we can get the hell out of here.”

Mike stood there, holding his shotgun loosely in his hands. “No, I—I mean, can’t we just tie him up or something?”

“Some Antichrist,” LaMastra muttered, mostly for Eddie’s benefit.

Mike came over and gently pushed Crow and Val aside. He knelt down in front of Eddie.

“Careful, kid,” said LaMastra, then to Eddie he said, “And you behave.”

Mike laid his shotgun down. “Mr. Oswald…when you were in the store the other day you came looking for me, didn’t you? You thought it was me, but then you came and met me and I could tell that you weren’t sure. Well, I have to tell you that I don’t give a rat’s ass if you live or die. I really don’t. You’ve been trying to kill me for a month now, and I didn’t do anything to you to deserve it. Everything in my life is shit. Everything. My mom’s a vampire and my dad…well, my dad is the kind of guy you should be going after. If you were really on some kind of holy mission to rid the world of evil, then you should be standing with us rather than against us.” He leaned closer. “I could kill you. They’d let me. They’d do it for me if I asked.”

“Damn skippy,” agreed LaMastra.

“Our friends have been dying. My best friend, Brandon, tried to kill me just five minutes ago. I’m probably going to die sometime tonight; and if not tonight, then sometime soon. So, I don’t have a lot to lose.”

Eddie’s eyes kept trying to meet the stare of Mike’s gold-rimmed red-blue eyes, and each time they fell away.

“Look at me,” Mike said.

Eddie looked at the floor.

“I said look at me.”

It took visible effort, but Eddie finally raised his eyes to meet—and hold—Mike’s stare.

“I have every reason to kill you. No one will say ‘boo.’ I have every reason to kill you, but one.”

Eddie licked his lips. “Wh—what’s that?”

“Because I’m not who you think I am.”

“You’re not a little boy. You’re not—”

“Human? No, I think I left that kind of thing behind. I’m born from monsters, Eddie, but I’m not a monster. Look me in the eyes.”

Eddie looked for as long as he could.

Mike leaned over, stretched and picked Eddie’s pistol off the floor. He offered it butt first to the big man.

“Hey, kid, what the hell you doing?” LaMastra barked, but Mike shook his head.

“Put the gun down,” he said to the detective. “Please, just put it down. I want Mr. Oswald to see that he’s free to make up his own mind.”

LaMastra looked at Crow, who hesitated and then nodded; LaMastra moved the barrel away and down, but he didn’t like doing it.

“Mr. Oswald,” Mike said, “I’m giving you a chance here to do the right thing. We’re fighting against these monsters. We could use your help.”

Tow-Truck Eddie stared at him, wide-eyed for what seemed like an eternity, and everyone could see the warring emotions as they passed like clouds across his face. His eyes were watery, his lips trembled.

“I…I’m sorry,” he said weakly. Mike smiled at him. “I’m so sorry!”

And he whipped his pistol up toward Mike and fired.

It was Willard Fowler Newton who saved Mike’s life. Why him and not the others was a question none of the survivors could ever adequately explain. It was as if an invisible hand shoved him hard from behind and he lurched into Mike and knocked him out of the way even as Oswald was pulling the trigger.

Then the world exploded as LaMastra, Crow, and Val all fired simultaneously, each from point-blank range, all of them shooting to kill. Oswald’s body was plucked off the ground and torn to red rags.

Then everyone was crowded around Mike, who lay half inside Weinstock’s room.

“Mike!” Crow saw blood on him and started pulling at Mike’s shirt, looking for the wound. But there was nothing.

“I’m okay,” he said, pushing himself up to a sitting position. “He missed.”

“Thank God!” Val turned to Newton, who had fallen down and was sitting against the wall. “You saved his life!”

“Finally a hero,” Newton said with a small smile, and then he pitched over on his side as blood poured from his chest.

“Christ,” Crow said, “Newt’s hit.”

“No!” cried Jonatha, trying to push past, but Val pushed her back as she and Crow tore at Newton’s clothes. They found the entry wound high on the right side. It was well away from the heart, but it was bleeding freely. Crow pressed his palm flat on the hole.

“Mike,” Crow yelled, “see if you can get Saul out here. He can tell us what to do.”

When Mike didn’t move, Crow looked at him. “Come on, damn it—he took that bullet for you. Move your ass!”

Val touched Crow’s cheek. “Crow…honey…Saul’s dead.”

Crow closed his eyes—first lightly and then he squeezed them shut, not wanting to look at the world anymore.

“I’m sorry,” Mike said, and it wasn’t clear if he was expressing sympathy for Crow’s grief or apologizing for Newton’s injury.

When Crow could talk past the stricture in his throat, he said, “Jonatha, get me something to use as a compress. Towels, anything. Val, keep the pressure on right here. See, just like that.” He guided her hands, then looked up to accept a folded towel from Jonatha. “Vince, see if Eddie there is wearing a belt. I need it.”

With Tow-Truck Eddie’s belt and the towel, Crow made a tight compress over the bullet wound. Newton was in and out of consciousness. “Jonatha, keep your eye on him. If he wakes up, don’t let him move that compress, and don’t let him move. There’s no exit wound, so that bullet’s still there. If he moves it could shift around and do damage.”

He stood and walked into Weinstock’s room. Val followed him and held his hand while Crow looked at his friend’s body, ugly and graceless in death.

“How?” he asked, and she told him.

Crow inhaled and exhaled very deeply, as if trying to abrade his lungs. He bent over Weinstock and kissed his friend on the forehead. “I’m so sorry, man.” Then he turned and pulled Val close and they just stood there, not kissing, just holding on to keep from drowning.

From the doorway, Mike said, “Crow…something’s happening.”

Crow had to tighten his mouth to respond to that, biting back everything he wanted to say, to yell.

“What is it, Mike?” Val asked.

“It’s that feeling I’ve been getting. What Mr. Newton calls my spider-sense? It’s, um, changing.” When Crow and Val were both looking at him, he said, “The vampires—I think they’re going.”

Crow frowned. “Going? Going where?”

“Going to him.”